Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

he waited until a Federal installation had been attacked before 
ordering military action. While there was certainly room for doubt 
concerning Lincoln’s exact position on slavery, it is also very pos-
sible that he was himself aware that the Union cause with slavery 
was very much weaker that it would be without slavery. Th
  e gains of 
an emancipation policy were later explained in terms of weakening 
the Confederate economy or strengthening the Union Army, but, 
important as these considerations were, there was another just as 
important: the imperative to remedy the North’s legitimacy defi cit, 
for the sake of the morale of the Union’s keenest supporters. At 
some level Lincoln was probably aware of this, but in 1861 he was 
beset by an immediate and elemental challenge to which he had to 
respond. In his statement concerning the right to revolution there 
was a half-stated implication that such a right only existed where it 
was realistic. For a while opposition to secession could be off ered in 
terms of realpolitik—the South was too weak to sustain it and its 
rebellion was destroying international respect for the republic and 
what it stood for. 
William Seward, shortly to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, 
broadly hinted at the international situation and the damage that 
secession would do to the projection of US power. Speaking in the 
Senate in January 1861 he declared: 
Th
  e American man-of-war is a noble spectacle. I have seen it enter 
an ancient port in the Mediterranean. All the world wondered at 
it and talked about it. Salvos of artillery, from forts and shipping in 
the harbor, saluted its fl ag. Princes and princesses and merchants 
paid it homage, and all the people blessed it as a harbinger of hope 
for their own ultimate freedom…I imagine now the same noble 
vessel entering the same haven. Th
 e fl ag of thirty-three stars and 
thirteen stripes has been drawn down, and in its place a signal is 
run up, which fl aunts the device of a lone star or a palmetto tree. 
Men ask, “Who is the stranger that thus steals into our waters?” 
Th
  e answer, contemptuously given, is: “She comes from one of the 
obscure republics of North America. Let her pass on.”
49
 
49  Quoted in a perceptive study by Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: 
the Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, Cambridge 1990, 
p. 18. Th
  at rival expansionist impulses in both sections provoked sectional 
hostility was clear enough by the 1850s. See Michael Morrison, Slavery and the 
32  an unfinished revolution

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Th
  e secession of a limited number of rural states would, in this 
view, drastically diminish US power. It would hand over control 
of the Mississippi to the rebels and put in question free access to 
Southern markets. Even worse, it would spell the end of the “empire 
of liberty,” harming both sections, since, separated, they would no 
longer count. Seward was speaking in the Senate and addressing his 
remarks as much to moderate Southerners, who could be deterred 
from joining the secession movement, as to Northerners. All con-
cerned were aware that the European powers were already jostling 
to take advantage of Washington’s distraction. (A French military 
expedition had landed in Mexico and was about to install a puppet 
regime, that of the “Emperor Maximilian.”) If there had been a 
sectional compromise, and some sort of nominal union had been 
salvaged, we can be pretty sure that it would have been sealed by 
territorial expansion—most likely the seizure of Cuba.
Th
  e Confederate president, Jeff erson Davis, sought to play down 
the defense of slavery as the motive for the confl ict and instead 
dwelt on the Northern threat to states’ rights and on the aff ronts 
that had been off ered to Southern honor. He stressed continuity 
between the ideals of the American Revolution and their latter-day 
embodiment in the Confederacy. Th
 e Confederate Constitution 
was closely modeled on that of 1787. Davis’s vice president, 
Alexander Stephens, was not so careful—he described slavery as 
the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. Th
  e nature of the confl ict 
itself would steadily highlight Southern dependence on slavery. Th
 e 
slaveholders’ aversion to taxation led the Confederate authorities to 
try to fi nance the war simply by printing money, with paralyzing 
consequences. 
Of course dissidents in the North claimed that Lincoln rode 
roughshod over republican liberties. But this was in the service 
of a Unionist nationalism to which many Democrats as well as 
Republicans also subscribed. As the confl ict proceeded, the salience 
of slavery in Southern society itself became of decisive importance, 
creating severe problems for the Confederacy and becoming a tar-
get of Unionist strategy. Th
  e Confederacy’s very belated attempt 
American West: the Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War, 
Chapel Hill 1997. 
introduction  33

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to free a few hundred slaves and enroll them in a colored regiment 
came much too late to have any impact and still rested on a racial 
compact. But implicitly it conceded that the South had built on a 
faulty foundation.
50
 
Let us return to the sources of the confl ict and the nature of the 
Republican threat. Th
 e Civil War crisis was, of course, precipi-
tated by the growth of the Republican party and the election of 
a Republican president. Lincoln would be able to make a host of 
appointments, including many in the Southern states themselves. 
He would be able to veto legislation and give orders to the executive 
apparatus. Moreover, civil society in the North had become toler-
ant of provocations escalating from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its more 
militant sequel (Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1856) to 
John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry. Brown was an out-and-out 
revolutionary yet broad sections of Northern opinion were inclined 
to excuse—or even endorse—his bloody escapades. Southern lead-
ers abominated religious abolitionism, but they were even more 
alarmed at the growth of a secular Republican politics that could 
win Northern majorities and use these to dominate the state. 
Southern fear of Republicanism and radical abolitionism imbued 
secession with a pre-emptive counter-revolutionary purpose and 
vocation, something easily perceived by Marx. Yet while the South’s 
counter-revolution speedily carved out a new state, the Northern 
revolution proved weak and laggard.
CONTRABANDS AND EMANCIPATION: 
CIVIL WAR STRATEGY AND POLITICS
Lincoln had gone to great lengths to promote the widest possible 
alliance in defense of the Union, accommodating moderates and 
making concessions to slaveholders in the border states. But by the 
summer of 1862, lack of progress, heavy casualties, and the cautious 
and defensive conduct of the war were inspiring mounting criti-
cism and a greater willingness to listen to abolitionists and Radical 
50 Bruce 
Levine, 
Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm 
Slaves During the Civil War, Oxford 2006. 
34  an unfinished revolution

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